Moodle is a powerful CMS (course management system), because it allows a high degree of interactivity, both between students enrolled in a course and between students and the course itself. Interactivity between students occurs largely in the Forum, Database, Wiki, and Glossary modules, whereas interactivity between students and the course occurs in the Lesson module. …read more…
“He’s Dead, Jim” Plugin for WordPress
If you like the spirit of Matt’s “Hello Dolly” plugin, which adds a line from Louis Armstrong’s song “Hello, Dolly” to the top of your WordPress backend, but feel that it doesn’t do much for your inner geek, I give you the “He’s Dead, Jim” plugin for WordPress. “He’s Dead, Jim” works like “Hello Dolly,” …read more…
Using Firefox Add-ons
One of the nice things about using Firefox as a web browser is that it is extensible—you can add things to it that help you do things you otherwise couldn’t. Firefox calls these add-ons. To get to them, go to your “Tools” menu and select “Add-ons”: Or, as the picture suggests, you can also press …read more…
Disable your WordPress Plugins
Like children, plugins don’t always play nicely together. Plugins can conflict with one another, with your theme, or even with WordPress, and those conflicts are often the result of an upgrade. A lot of the issues I see with WordPress can be traced back to plugin conflicts. Most people don’t even think of plugins when …read more…
The iTunes Conundrum, part 2
In my first spreadsheet tutorial, I described how I wanted to take this information from iTunes: and calculate the average song length. If you read that tutorial, you know that the average length of each item in my iTunes library (including podcasts) turned out to be 246.9675647 seconds. In this tutorial, we’ll find out how …read more…
The iTunes Conundrum, part 1
There is a lot that you can do with a spreadsheet beyond simple sums and averages. If you are in business or science, you learn these more complicated functions quickly because everyone around you knows about them and uses them, but if you are in another field, they will probably remain a mystery to you. …read more…
OpenOffice
I recently replaced my old Dell Latitude D630 laptop with a bottom-of-the-line Toshiba Satellite C655. I got a lot of use out of the Dell, but I was its fourth owner. Its previous owner was a fourteen-year-old boy, so it’s proven itself to be a tough little machine. The Dell came with a …read more…
MozBackup – Backup or Move your Mozilla Profiles
I recently migrated over to a different laptop (a Toshiba C655), and was faced with the prospect of moving several hundred bookmarks and passwords over from my ancient Dell—a task I was not looking forward to, as I am really pressed for time right now, but can’t be without that information. Fortunately, I found a …read more…
